I slap at my back pocket, nodding numbly when I feel its familiar outline through the denim. Can my mom wire us money, I wonder? How does wiring money even work? I’m imagining us sleeping under a bridge somewhere, begging for change at the train station and stealing half-eaten breadbaskets off people’s tables at cafés.
“How are we even going to check into the hostel?” Sadie asks, sounding significantly less calm than she did a moment ago. “My credit card was in there, all my money—”
“I still have my wallet,” Ian says, digging it out of his back pocket and holding it up as evidence.
“Well, good for you, man,” Gabe snaps. “But I don’t. And—”
“It’s fine,” Ian says in that same collected, easy voice. “We can stay at my parents’ place while we get it figured out.”
For a second I think I’ve misheard him, that he’s naming some French shelter for teenage idiots from America. Then my brain makes the connection.
“Your parents’ place?” Gabe and Sadie ask in unison.
“Your parents’ place?” I echo.
Ian smiles sheepishly.
It’s not in Paris, not exactly, but in a quiet residential suburb on the outskirts called Saint-Cloud that’s full of lush green parks and expensive-looking houses. Ian uses my phone to get us an Uber from the airport, keying in the address off the top of his head and speaking quiet, capable French to the driver; I sneak incredulous glances in his direction before giving up and openly staring at him, wide-eyed. He looks over, shrugging in a good-natured, slightly embarrassed way, like I caught him picking his nose.
Finally I shrug and lean my head back against the seat, wrung out and exhausted as a used-up travel tube of toothpaste. We spent close to an hour with the airport police, who took our statements and my cell phone number and instructed all four of us to stay together in case they found our stuff and caught the guys who’d taken it, while also somehow managing to communicate—without ever actually saying it—that we ought not hold our collective breath. “You have a place to stay, yes?” the officer asked us, clearly hoping we weren’t planning to camp out in his terminal for the foreseeable future. When Ian nodded hastily, his entire body relaxed.
The house itself is tall and narrow, a stone and stucco situation with a high, peaked roof and fat yellow rosebushes on either side of the bright-red door. From the wide leaded front window I can see straight through to the back of the property, where a small courtyard holds a sunken swimming pool lined with painted Spanish tile. “They rent it out sometimes,” Ian explains, keying a four-digit code into the pad above the doorknob. “But there’s nobody here right now.”
“This is amazing,” Sadie is saying, clearly taking the entire situation in stride like it’s just one more neat backpacking adventure. Gabe still looks like he wants to die. As we step inside the cool, dark house I turn in a circle, gazing around at the wood and marble, the antique chandelier hanging above the steep staircase that leads to the second floor. I can’t help thinking of Ian’s dowdy Bay State parents, who I met for dinner at a Legal Sea Foods in Boston back in April: his dad was wearing Tevas and a golf shirt. His mom carried a Museum of Fine Arts tote bag instead of a purse. Both of them were friendly and engaging, but neither of them seemed like the kind of person who secretly owned vacation property in France. Not to mention Ian himself, with his flannel button-downs and job shelving books at the library and nose for the cheapest noodle bowls in Chinatown. How the hell did he forget to mention this place the whole time we were planning our vacation?
Never mind how—why?
“Ian, seriously,” I start, then snap my jaws shut as I catch sight of Gabe and Sadie still standing in the front hall, empty-handed as two paupers straight out of a fairy tale. I don’t know what I want to say to him, exactly, but whatever it is, I know that I don’t want to say it in front of this particular audience. “Um, is this okay with your mom and dad?”
“Oh, yeah, for sure,” Ian says. “I mean, I’ll call them from your phone in a bit, but they’re definitely not going to mind.” He turns to Gabe and Sadie, motioning down a long, wide hallway beside the staircase. “You guys can camp out in the guest room through there.” He sounds completely unbothered by the whole situation—happy for a chance to play the host, even, like having our luggage and passports stolen in a foreign country is just another kuddelmuddel to tell stories about later. For the first time his competence kind of annoys me: I’ve spent the last few days—I’ve spent our whole relationship—admiring his talent at getting around in unfamiliar places, how unflappable and open to the unexpected he is. But now I can’t help feeling like it’s probably easy to seem sophisticated if you’ve already secretly been everywhere with your rich parents, eating snails and strolling through galleries and sneaking sips of wine across the table.
Gabe and Sadie and I follow him into the kitchen, which is like something out of a magazine: all marble tile and wide-planked floors and an old-fashioned enamel sink with a big white drainboard. Schoolhouse lights hang above a butcher-block island. “I don’t think there’s a ton here to eat,” Ian says, opening the stainless-steel fridge and peering skeptically inside, “but there’s a grocery store like two blocks down that way if you guys want to get some snacks and wine and stuff?” He motions toward the side of the house, back in the direction we came from.
Gabe nods. “We’ll go,” he says, nodding at Sadie. Then, looking suddenly mortified: “But—” He breaks off.
“No no, it’s fine.” Ian shakes his head. “It’s a wicked old-fashioned place, my parents keep an account there. So you can just put it on that.” He trails off a little bit as he explains it, as if the absurdity of telling us that his parents have an account at an old-fashioned French grocery and that we can use it to pay for our lunch is suddenly dawning on him. He has the decency to look embarrassed.
“We’ll pay you back,” Gabe says firmly, and for a second I forget how angry I’ve been all day and feel a little bit bad for him—I know he’s already feeling sensitive about money, on account of everything that’s going on at home with the pizza place. There’s no way this isn’t humiliating.
Once the door snicks shut behind them Ian takes a breath, then turns to look at me. “So, okay,” he says, rubbing a wary hand over his beard. “About this place.”
“Yeah.” I brush past him, opening various cabinet doors open until I find the one housing a cache of pristine glassware flecked with tiny bubbles, heavy and handmade. I fill a cup at the sink, gulp it down like I’ve been wandering the desert for forty years. “About this place.”
Ian sighs like I’m being dramatic. “Molly—”
“No, Ian. I have no clue what’s going on here, and actually I’m kind of pissed.” Now that the initial bafflement has passed, I’m angry for some reason, and I don’t even know how to explain exactly why. There’s the obvious, of course: that he’s been holding this back, that he’s flat-out lied to me about who he is and where he comes from. But there’s also the sting of looking like an idiot in front of Sadie and Gabe, and the shameful shock of realizing I’m not the only one in this relationship with secrets. If I’m being honest with myself, I’m not sure which part upsets me most. “I’m trying to figure out how we’ve spent the last five days tooling around Europe—never mind the eight months we’ve known each other—and you somehow neglected to mention your parents have a fucking palace in Paris, France.”
Ian leans back against the counter with his arms crossed, like I’m someone’s irascible toddler. “First of all,” he begins, “I didn’t neglect to mention it.”
“Yeah,” I snap, “no kidding. You didn’t tell me on purpose. What were you worried about, that I was some kind of manky gold digger?”
“Of course not,” Ian says. “Come on.”
“Then what?” I demand. “You let me pick out hotels and search for bargain flights and print us all a freaking Groupon for skydiving yesterday—you let me plan this whole trip—and meanwhile the entire time you’r
e sitting on this place? You grew up in places like this place.” That’s a part of it too, I realize suddenly. Admitting it even to myself is gross and unflattering, but the truth is I’ve spent the last eight months walking around with this made-up version of Ian in my mind: a sweet, unassuming book nerd who’d somehow managed to pick up all this knowledge and insight about the world just by exercising his library card. I was so sure he was inventing me, back at the beginning. But I did exactly the same thing to him.
“I feel like an idiot,” I tell him finally.
“I’m sorry. I don’t want you to feel that way.” Ian shakes his head, reaching a hand out in my direction; I jerk away, and he sighs. “Molly. Come on. You were so excited about this trip. I didn’t want to take away from that. I would have sounded like a huge douche.”
“Okay,” I say. “What about the however many months we knew each other before I started planning it, then? You just never found a moment to drop it into conversation that your parents are gajillionaires?”
He shrugs. “They’re not gajillionaires, first of all. And it never came up while we were at school.”
“At school you have three roommates, one of whom is a mouse.” I blow out a frustrated breath. In Boston one of our favorite things to do was to meet halfway between my dorm and his apartment, then see how far we could get on ten bucks. I tried dollar oysters that way; we wandered up to the top of the Green Monster in the middle of a rain delay at Fenway. Suddenly I’m wondering if those things were pretend, some kind of disingenuous experiment in slumming it. “I don’t understand,” I finally say. “Like—you work.”
Ian snorts a laugh. “Yeah, Molly,” he says. “I work.”
“Why?”
“Because I like the library?” Ian asks, holding his hands out, palms up. “Because my parents think it’s important not to have things handed to you? Because having things handed to you makes you an asshole? I don’t know. I just do.”
“Do you guys have other houses?” I can’t resist asking. It’s crass, but less crass than what I actually want to ask, which is how rich are you, exactly? “Like, besides your regular house?”
Ian shrugs, uneasy. “A place in Aspen, yeah,” he admits. “And one near Lake Como, but we never go to that one, they just bought it as an investment.”
“Oh my God.” I shake my head. “Seriously? Seriously.”
Ian makes a face at that. “Okay. Enough over there, please, tiger. It’s not like you grew up on the mean streets. Your mom was literally on the homepage of Amazon the other day.”
“That’s not the point,” I say, though of course I know he’s got one. My righteous anger is breaking a little, the knowledge that I’m being slightly ridiculous beginning to seep through the cracks. It’s not actually that different from how my mom lives, after all, padding barefoot around her quiet house in Star Lake instead of dressing up for publishing parties down in Manhattan; still, there’s no way I’m going to admit that out loud. “And anyway, we’ve never had an investment property next door to George Clooney.”
“Would it have made a difference?” Ian asks. “If I told you that my parents had a bunch of money? Would you have, like, liked me more, or wanted to get more serious faster, or—”
My eyes widen. “You do think I’m a gold digger!”
“No,” Ian says, “I’m just saying it makes people weird sometimes.” He sighs, leaning back against the massive butcher-block island. “I don’t know what to tell you, Molly. There are things about yourself you don’t like to talk about, right? I mean, I think you’ve been pretty clear about that.”
It’s the winning shot, a three-pointer from midcourt, and both of us know it. Still, I dig my heels in. “That’s different,” I insist.
Ian raises his eyebrows. “Really?” he asks. “How?”
“Because—” I start, then break off in frustration. I don’t have an answer, not really. By now I’m fully aware I’m being a complete dingbat—quite seriously, what kind of spoiled brat throws a tantrum at the prospect of three unexpected cost-free days at a giant house in the Parisian suburbs?—but the truth is I just feel so foolish. I want Ian to feel foolish, too.
“Look,” he says, when all I can come up with is a belligerent shrug of my shoulders. “You told me at the very beginning of our relationship that there were limits on what you were willing to tell me about yourself—limits on how close you’d let me get to you.”
That stings. “It’s not about not wanting to be close,” I promise for the hundredth time. “It’s just—”
“But I don’t push you, do I?” Ian cuts me off. “I assume you’ll tell me what I need to know, when I need to know it. I respect the fact that your life is yours to share or not.”
I cross my arms, staring at the complicated tile work on the backsplash. The worst part is how I know he’s right. The things I’ve chosen to keep from him—the fallout from my mom’s book, getting pregnant, the fact that Gabe and I were together at all—are way more significant than something as ultimately meaningless as money. And deep down in the smallest, darkest caverns of my heart, I know that’s the real reason I’m so upset. “You’re right,” I finally say. The words taste like ash on the back of my tongue. “I’m sorry.”
Ian shakes his head. “I don’t want you to apologize.”
“What do you want, then?”
“I don’t know.” He breaks off then, stays quiet for a long, loaded minute. Through the window I can hear a bird singing something lonely, the faint hum of the pool filter out in the courtyard. Finally he lifts his head. “You want to hear a story?”
“Um,” I say, not sure what he’s getting at. “Sure.”
“Okay.” Ian lets a breath out, boosting himself up onto the island before he begins. “Look,” he says again, “I’m sure this is going to be shocking to you, but I wasn’t the coolest, most popular dude in high school. I didn’t get, like, shoved into lockers or anything, and I had some friends, but mostly I just kind of . . . faded into the wallpaper. Does that make sense?”
It’s hard to picture, actually—Ian is such a magnet around campus, with friends from all different social groups—but I nod. “Sure,” I say again. “Keep going.”
Ian nods. “Anyway, there was this girl Alyssa I’d liked basically since middle school. She was a math genius and on the dance team and she had exactly zero time for me, which wasn’t her fault since mostly I was, like, sitting at the bus stop reading Lord of the Rings for the fiftieth time.” He looks down for a moment, picking at the skin around his thumb. “But junior year I got this car. And it was my dad’s old car, he’d gotten a new one, but it was still probably a nicer car than a sixteen-year-old kid had any business driving.”
“Aha.” Suddenly I think I might know where this story is going. “And out of the blue Alyssa was like, hey boy how you doing?”
Ian smiles. “Not just Alyssa,” he admits. “Also all of Alyssa’s dance friends. But it was less hey boy how you doing and more like, hey boy can you take us to Starbucks, and since you’re in the driver’s seat would you mind paying?”
I wince. “Ouch.”
“I mean, it was my own fault,” Ian says with a shrug. “I’m the one who kept saying yes. And she was always kind of different when it was just the two of us, you know? She was funny and smart and cool, and she always had great music on her phone. So I kind of didn’t mind buying her lunch, or spotting her cash at the juice place or wherever.” He makes a face. “It wasn’t until she asked if I’d mind driving her boyfriend home too that I figured out she probably wasn’t sitting up every night waiting for me to make my move.”
I clap a hand over my face. “Oh noooooo.”
“The worst part is I didn’t even say no,” Ian continues, smiling a little ruefully. “I drove them both home like every day of senior year.”
“Oh, Ian,” I say, wanting to travel back in time and protect his vulnerable high school heart. “That’s miserable. I’m sorry.”
Ian shrugs again, easy;
it’s the gesture of a person who has learned his lesson the hard way. “I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel bad for me, or think my life is so tough or whatever. Clearly I know my life isn’t tough. And I should have told you the truth from the beginning. But once I got to Boston I decided that I was going to be absolutely sure that anybody who liked me was in it for my sparkling personality, and not ’cause I drove a stupid nice car or whatever.”
I nod slowly. It makes perfect sense: he wanted to be a new version of himself, free from his old blunders and baggage. How can I possibly blame him for that when it’s exactly what I wanted, too? “I get it,” I tell him. “I really do.”
“I thought you might,” Ian says. He reaches out and nudges my knee with the toe of his sneaker; I loop my finger through the laces, yanking once.
“So,” I tease, looking up at him and smiling a little. “What kind of car was it, exactly?”
“Jerk,” Ian says, but he’s smiling back.
The four of us lay low that afternoon, Sadie floating on her back in the swimming pool and Gabe taking off on a walk around the leafy green neighborhood, a pair of borrowed headphones jammed into his ears. My book was in my suitcase, so I find a battered paperback copy of The Tempest on one of Ian’s parents’ bookshelves and post up in a lounge chair, struggling through the old English with my brow furrowed and my jaw clenched in determined consternation. I feel guilty for not rushing out to see the Eiffel Tower and the gardens at the Rodin Museum—both of which were on the itinerary for today, I remember grimly, cringing at the idea of all those boxes left unchecked—but in the end I’m too wrung out to care.
“You hungry?” Ian asks in the early evening, appearing at the back door as the sun sinks behind the olive trees and the air takes on a cool dampness that tempts fall. He called the airport police about an hour ago for an update: Gabe and I were standing in a security-camera blind spot, he reported when he hung up, though they said they were going over footage from other parts of the terminal and wanted us to stay together for the rest of the night in case they found anything. “There’s a neighborhood place my parents like not too far from here—we could ask those guys if they want to go.”
9 Days and 9 Nights Page 14